MESSAGE FROM THE AMBASSADOR

I feel deeply honored to welcome all guests to the Website of Tanzania Embassy in Beijing, P. R. China.  The Ambassador of Tanzania in Beijing is also accredited  to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Mongolia.

It is indeed a privilege for me to be given an opportunity to serve in this great country during this most fascinating period of its history.  In the past, when I visited China (like any one else), I was always struck by its unique history, culture and traditional hospitality of its people.  Now once again there is unfolding of historic events in the country.  China with the population of more than 1.3 billion people has become a second world economic power house; hence for Tanzania this is another opportune time to further deepen our strong strategic cooperation and promote common development agendas by encouraging high level consultations, cultural exchanges and increasing investments and trade volumes as well as regulating trade practices.

In the past 50 years, there has been friendly exchanges and cooperation between Tanzania and China in political affairs, culture, socio-economic activities and people to people ties also continued to deepen.  No doubt the 50 years relations between two countries has also withstood a test of time and stayed vibrant.  During the early days of independence and the period of freedom fighting in Southern Africa we were together and since then we continued to safeguard state sovereignty of our nations.  The years that followed have taken our relations to higher levels.  Senior Citizens of our two nations have been wisely reminding us that “this long standing friendship between Tanzania and China is not like water without source or tree without roots.  It has continued to grow through thin and thick and we treated one another with sincererity  because both countries seek economic development through win-win situation”

At the beginning (during the generation of the founding fathers of our two nations – the late Julius Nyerere and Chairman Mao Ze Dong), cordial relations were hastily translated into economic terms by embarking into such landmark projects as Friendship (Urafiki) Textile Mills, Farm Implements Factory, China – Tanzania Shipping Lines (Sinotaship) and of course TAZARA (Tanzania-Zambia Railways).  In later years these projects were followed by socio-economic projects of huge impacts in the lives of Tanzanians.  The projects include water, agriculture (demonstration centres), education, sports, culture, health (i.e. volunteer doctors and construction of cardiology and open heart surgery centre) etc.

After the formulation of FOCAC framework of action, Chinese and Tanzania governments granted more open mindset to investment undertakings in our countries.  In Tanzania, this enabled more big Chinese companies to embark on mega investments schemes (in collaboration with Tanzania Companies) in such areas as coal and iron ore, mining, exploration, drilling, transportation and processing of natural gas, construction of Fibre Optic IT Infrastructure Backbone, Construction of roads and new port on the basis of BOT and PPP.  Between June and December 2012, China Exim Bank alone has made available about 18 billion Yuan (about 3 billion US$) to finance most of the above projects.  During the year 2013, major Chinese Banks namely the China Development Bank and the Agricultural Bank of China, have decided to enter the Tanzania financial markets and collaborate with similar local institutions to provide funding for more potential projects. 

Tourism:  It is estimated that in the year 2013, more than 80 million Chinese will travel abroad as tourists.  Tanzania cannot ignore this huge source of tourism.  In order to increase tourist arrivals from China government  of Tanzania intends to open new honorary consulate in the City of Guangzhou and the Embassy in collaboration with TANAPA, TTB and other tourist stakeholders also intend to appoint tourism representation in several cities of China.

Through this website visitors will be able to get through to other links and we hope it will assist everyone to know about our activities and Tanzania in general.

Welcome

Philip S. Marmo

Ambassador